Westlake #8

A wise singer/songwriter with a mullet once said:

You'll never say hello to you
Until you get it on the red line overload
You'll never know what you can do
Until you get it up as high as you can go

Since I'm going to be racing the Chapel Crit on Thursday, then the Tour of the Valley on Friday, my plan was to ride an intense hour at Westlake then shut it down and go home early.

It was Zipp Demo night and the weather was perfect, except for the stiff Northern breezes, so the fields were big. 50 A and about 20 B riders. Lots of primes were offered: Zipp merchandise, cash, and points. I wanted to go after an early prime from a long way out to get some pacing data for the Valley TT.

On the first lap, Bridgette rang the bell and held up a Zipp jersey. I thought that would be a good one to go for since nobody else seemed very interested. When we rolled through turn 1, I accelerated and jumped clear. By the time I hit turn 2, I had a clear view of the field. The gap was pretty big! I put my head down and settled into a hard tempo. S curves. Still clear. Turn 3. Still clear. Sweeper onto the finishing straight. Still clear. 100 meters to go. Then out of nowhere an RGF jersey (Cameron Jackson) went around me! Arghh. I didn't even see him coming.

The gap was still pretty big, so I decided to see how far I could go solo. I made it another half lap before the field ripped around me. Actually, I got caught on the most difficult part of the course. Next time I do that, I'll make sure to get caught before a turn, into the wind, or on a slight downhill. Instead, I got caught on Ranney Parkway in the crosswind after the field wound it up out of turn 2.

Accelerating from 25 mph to 30 mph hurt a little. A lot actually. I hung on for a while, then slipped off the back.

I decided to just hammer solo instead of waiting for the field to come around. I kept that up for a while, and eventually another solo rider, from Stark Velo, caught up with me, and we worked together. A two man TT effort is total misery.

We kept up a decent pace for 30 minutes until we got lapped. I hopped back in and did several more laps. Once my back started to get tight, I stopped. I still felt pretty fresh. Hopefully that was a good tune-up for Thursday.

I was bummed that I got dropped, but the good news is it felt really easy to ride in the field even when we hauled ass, and I have good pacing information for the Valley TT on Friday morning.